FREE BOOKS: William R. Forstchen

The Lost Regiment series, paperback, 6 books - During the Treasonous Slaver's Revolt of 1861-1865 in the US, an army regiment from Maine sails south. Their boat gets flung into an alternate world, where vast steppes surround a central sea. Other humans have been flung to this world in the past, with pastoral Russians, city-building Romans, empire-building Chinese, and various other cultures living scattered about the land. All are very low-tech; the Maine soldiers and their black-powder weapons are the highest tech around. However, there is also a culture of large fierce horse-riding aliens, who find humans tasty. The Maine soldiers show the humans how to make rifles, steam engines, paddle boats, and canon to fight the human-eating hordes. It gets a bit strained by the end when the humans independently invent tanks, aircraft, and aircraft carriers, all within the lifetime of the solders who brought black powder to a place with no technological base.

One Second After - hardcover. An electromagnetic pulse fries all electronics in the US. Without refrigeration and transportation, people begin to starve, and die from formerly-treatable medical conditions. The protagonists instantly become insular, and proudly are notably unhelpful to their fellow citizens as they migrate from urban areas to look for work and food in rural farms. Then, they fight off a cannibal army. This is odd, as all 20th-century examples of widespread cannibalism involve neighbors eating each other in secret; if people have enough energy to march all day, they aren't at the stage where they resort to eating scrawny humans. Then the US marines come back from Iraq/Iran and give everyone MREs. The end.

If you'd like these, please comment. If multiple people want them, I'll give preference to the ones with lowest postage costs, and then flip a coin. If postage costs would exceed the cost of picking them up at your local used bookstore, I'll find a home for them locally. NOTE: US Customs requires me to get the full legal name, home address, and telephone number of recipients in the US.